The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic is releasing a major 520-page report on its two-year investigation of the Covid pandemic, laying out the many failures and some successes of the government’s response to it.

In a statement, the committee’s chairman, Congressman Brad Wenstrup, said, “The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a distrust in leadership. Trust is earned. Accountability, transparency, honesty, and integrity will regain this trust. A future pandemic requires a whole of America response managed by those without personal benefit or bias. We can always do better, and for the sake of future generations of Americans, we must. It can be done.”

The committee’s investigation determined that it is “most likely” the Covid virus “emerged from a laboratory” at Wuhan in Communist China. It listed the five strongest arguments to support a “lab leak” incident, including the virus possessing a “biological characteristic not found in nature” and researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology experiencing Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019. The committee says there has not been “evidence of a natural origin” to dispute the idea that it emerged in a lab.

Investigators on the committee said several relief programs designed to help individuals and businesses struggling financially, such as the Paycheck Protection Program, were rife with fraud, and lax oversight of them led to fraudsters making off with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. 

As for policies implemented to prevent the spread of the virus, the committee said there was “no conclusive evidence” that masks actually protected people. The report criticized “prolonged lockdowns” for causing “immeasurable harm” financially to businesses, but also to the “mental and physical health of Americans, with a particularly negative effect on younger citizens.”

“Rather than prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable populations, federal and state government policies forced millions of Americans to forgo crucial elements of a healthy and financially sound life,” the report says. 

Investigators also said officials in New York committed “medical malpractice” when Governor Cuomo required nursing homes to accept Covid-positive patients. 

Additionally, the report says public health officials “often spread misinformation through conflicting messaging, kneejerk reactions, and a lack of transparency. In the most egregious examples of pervasive misinformation campaigns, off-label drug use, and the lab leak theory were unjustly demonized by the federal government.”

The report was not all negative. It credited President Trump with implementing travel restrictions from foreign countries, which the committee says saved lives.

Addressing the rollout of the Covid vaccines, the committee called the operation to develop a vaccine “highly successful” and one that saved “millions of lives.” However, it criticized the messaging about the vaccine, such as the claim that it would prevent the transmission of the virus.

Members of the committee also criticized the “rushed” approval of the vaccine by the FDA, mandates for people to be vaccinated that “trampled individual freedoms” and “harmed military readiness,” and a “coordinated effort to ignore natural immunity.”

Another portion of the report focused on the impact of school closures. The committee finds that “‘science’ never justified prolonged school closures” as children were “unlikely to contribute to the spread” of the virus. It says the standardized test scores “show children lost decades worth of academic progress” as a result, and school-aged children faced increased levels of mental and physical health issues.